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Super for Europe

27 March 1993

European companies who build and use supercomputers have formed a consortium
to develop powerful new super computers based on parallel processing. The
group was launched by Carlo Rubbia, head of CERN, the European centre for
particle physics. Last year Rubbia urged the European Commission to help
to fund the use and development of supercomputers, to prevent Europe from
being left out of an industry that is dominated by the US and Japan.

The consortium aims to develop two computers employing arrays of ‘from
32 to over 1000’ parallel processors by 1996, at CERN and at CERFACS, the
European Centre for Research and Training in Scientific Calculation in France.
The 50 scientists expected to work on the project will be partly funded
by ESPRIT, the Commission’s research programme for information technology.
The consortium includes three European super computer firms, Meiko, Parsys
and Telmat, and meteorological institutes in Britain, France and Germany.

One goal of the project is to design machines that can provide massive
computing power for specific applications, such as weather forecasting.